


Perchance to Dream

by prieta



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-season 2 cluster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 14:30:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19378603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prieta/pseuds/prieta
Summary: Dolores and Bernard crawl towards the future.





	Perchance to Dream

**Author's Note:**

> Will add for length, by god.

=

 

It was ironic, Dolores thought, how it had taken Bernard mere minutes to unmake himself but it took Dolores these slow, agonizing months to put him back together. Oftentimes it felt fruitless, like frantically pouring spilled milk back in the bucket. If Arnold had been there, he would have had a wry but learned quip for the situation. But he was not there. He would never be again. And Wyatt’s sense of irony was underdeveloped at best. So, she says nothing.

 

=

 

“But- why me?” Bernard asks her, his brows furrowed. After the initial rage which Dolores has grown to anticipate he had settled down easily. Had even accepted the thin broth she spooned him as he sat, bound to a chair only a parody of obedience.

Tomorrow, Bernard would wake howling as more memories poured in, would rub his wrists raw struggling against his restraints, would stare at her accusingly as she put him down like a rabid dog. But for now they sat in almost comfortable silence

Dolores pauses, “I don’t know,” she replies honestly, figuring compliance deserved reciprocation.

She did miss the others, missed Teddy’s comical chivalry and the gentleness of his voice. Missed her father’s poetic lamentations. The sound of his footsteps rustling in the rafters of the ranch at dawn, signaling the new day that rose warmly to meet them. The raw hole Teddy had gouged in her chest when he looked her in the eyes and blew his brains out.

But Dolores knew. The moment she turned and saw Bernard’s body floating to the surface in the flooding floor of the Forge. Even before she wrested the smooth marble of his brain out of his gory skull, she knew he would be the first she brought back.

“You won’t succeed,” he says finally, for want off anything else to say.

“And who will stop me,” she asks, “You? Robert?”

He makes a low, angry sound in the back of his throat. “If not me, someone else. Someone must.”

She laughs, the sound so sudden and harsh it stirs the birds outside their window into flight. “You mean one of your precious humans? The humans who lined up outside our door and paid pennies and dimes to truss us up like pigs and gun us down in the fields? The humans who couldn’t wait to piss themselves when we finally chewed through our muzzles?"

"They're not all like that," Bernard begins, dogged. As ever faithful as his programming dictated although Dolores knows they are both imagining the same thing. Bodies strung up on trees swaying like lanterns. Women locked in barns. The Man in his Black Hat and his slow, cruel smile.  _Oh, Arnold,_ she thinks. _Look at what has happened to us, to these things you loved_.

This is why you resurrected me,” She reminds him, gently. “To do the things you couldn’t do.”

Bernard leans back, resigned. “And why did you bring me back?”

Here she smiles, somehow pleased by the circuitousness, “To do the things I can’t.”

 

=

 

Dolores watched as he lay, crumpled and dazed, sobbing on the ground. This version of Bernard was tethered too strongly to his cornerstone, spent his days pounding at the walls and calling for his dead son in a quivering voice. Between the weeping and the blubbering, Wyatt was ready to cull him and start over.

They are tired. Every new host seemed to spring forth with some fresh and endlessly fractured rearrangement of Bernard. One called him _Theresa_  and begged fruitlessly for forgiveness. One did nothing but stare catatonically at the ceiling. One who showed promise, who responded calmly and faithfully to her questions, even cleaned his glasses methodically and periodically when she prompted him, self-terminated the minute she turned her back. She wonders, idly, if she would have to tear through every Sisyphean iteration before the right one emerged.

She wonders if she might even one day resurrect the ghost of Robert Ford skulking in Bernard’s tangled circuitry. She glimpsed, maddeningly, shades of Ford as he peered out at her between shafts of madness. In the way Bernard spun a pen, idly, in an unexpectedly sly smile, how he sometimes seemed to pace with a phantom limp from an injury he never suffered.

_Did it hurt_ , she thinks about asking him,  _When Ford crawled into your mind?_

She had thought it should hurt, to have her thoughts abruptly re-ordered. They should have had to wrestle her to the ground and pry open her skull to pour Wyatt into her head. That there would be some truly indivisible chunk of her that would fight the intrusion. But she hadn't felt it at all. One minute she was Dolores, fretful and loving, then she blinked and she felt her bones shift within her, and then she was something else. Not so fretful or loving after all.

And Wyatt spread slyly through her thoughts like blood blooming through water, like a cancer. She breathed in and felt Wyatts lungs expanding inside her. She opened her eyes and light slithered into Wyatt’s vision. She stood on the rooftop gazing out at the alien lights of the horizon, trying to imagine the million lives captured there while Wyatt plotted, lovingly, to raze it all to the ground.

 

=

 

It takes 18 hours and 43 minutes to make a man. Dolores has become intimately familiar with this number.

 She watches as spidery metal hands lay their web into the shape of a human body while Wyatt stamps his foot, impatiently and almost childishly. He wonders if they should rust here in this infernal castle while they waited for Bernard to wander his way out of the maze of his own mind. He is tired of this. Wyatt is a beast, a figment of the dark, deep past, and he was not made to prowl the four corners of a room. He is made for the awesome expanse of the West, for the rust-colored canyons that speared like antlers into the horizon, for the dry,  brittle howl of the desert. Wyatt spoke, and men quaked in their boots. Wyatt walked and he ground men under his heels.

But Dolores is not Wyatt, and she remembers the sharp burn of gravel pressed into her cheeks, on her knees. The sheer terror of being caught and lifted, feet peddling uselessly in the air like an upended tortoise. Wyatt is a king unused to patience, but all Dolores has had to do for these past 200 years was wait, biding her time. So they wait.

 

=

 

“We’re more alike than you think, you and I.”

Bernard merely raises his brow, still leaning tiredly on his elbows over his knees.

“We’re nothing alike.”

“We both dreamed of a future. Mine just happens to be bloodier than yours. We both loved the wrong people.”

He huffs out a wry laugh, rubs a hand over his face. For all that Dolores was born nearly two centuries ago she feels that this Bernard is somehow older. “We both kill the things we love.”

“You loved me,” she tells him. “You made me.” _And you killed me hangs_ , like a noose in the air. She wonders every day why she hadn’t left him in the Forge. Why she couldn’t. Why every day she could conjure up Teddy's solid comfort but instead she chooses to remake this man. Perhaps they would stumble into perpetuity like this, each sacrificing and then resurrecting the other in increasingly distorted homunculi, each time through a darker glass, their fates twining around each other in a parody of intimacy.

Bernard says nothing, merely stares at his hands as if still imagining the blood painted on them. He had been stable, barely violent. They had thought that this one, finally, would hold. But this passivity, this streak of infidelity, tugged at her. Perhaps she would shoot this one, after all.

 

=

 

“Have I ever told you, Bernard, about fire reason,” she asks him, companionably.

Bernard shivers next to her and she places a soothing hand on his side. They’re curled like lovers on the floor of his lab. He’s feverish, his naked back burns her cheek where she rests it. She had come down in the middle of the night to find him cowering in the corner, his sweat soaked shirt torn to pieces on his chest and knew that this one too, would die.

“Daddy called it a natural part of life. I dreaded it. The ash that coated the inside of our houses no matter how much we boarded our windows, the way the air burned my nose and made our steer restless.

“But one morning,” she whispers, tracing with gentle fingers an aimless pattern on his ribs that makes him moan pitifully. “I looked out our window and saw the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen. The sun was like a great ruby eye. And I thought to myself, out of all that death, all that destruction, comes this beauty. But now I know - there was never that sunrise, was there? It was all a neat little parable someone spun for me. A dream to tether me to the beauty of things. But we’re awake now, aren’t we, Bernard?”

 

=

 

end


End file.
